Conferencing and telephony services have become more popular as the capacity and capabilities of networks and communication devices have advanced. Users of these services engage in video calls in the context of business, social, and other interactions, and using a variety of communication platforms and technologies. Skype®, Skype® for Business, Google Hangouts®, and Facetime® are just some examples of such services. Additionally, messaging services can be integrated with the conferencing and telephony services or operated as stand-along messaging platforms.
Users can engage in search features of these conferencing, telephony, or messaging services to find other users on the communication platforms, such as typing in a username or various search parameters to discover other users. However, these search features typically are difficult to optimize with regard to search scope, and can either give too broad of results or too narrow of results. Moreover, as the quantity of users of these communication platforms increases, searching among the multitude of users can consume processing resources and storage of pre-searched results. This can lead to a poor user experience when searching among users and finding people for engaging in communication sessions.
Overview
Systems, apparatuses, services, platforms, and methods are discussed herein that provide user search services to a communication platform. An example user search service receives a user query to find users of the communication platform associated with one or more search terms, performs a graph search process based at least on the one or more search terms to identify a first set of users related to the user through at least one common user, and performs an indexed search process to identify a second set of users associated with the one or more search terms. The user search service then presents to the user a result view comprising the first set of users prioritized over the second set of users.
This Overview is provided to introduce a selection of concepts in a simplified form that are further described below in the Detailed Description. It may be understood that this Overview is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended to be used to limit the scope of the claimed subject matter.